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Urban car-free mobility
(2021)
Across the globe, urban areas experience the phenomena of rising road-congestion, air pollution and car accidents. These are just a few popular quantified effects that arise due to rapid, uncoordinated urbanization on a car-centric city layout. There is an urgent need to consider new concepts of urban mobility development to combat these negative effects. Car-free mobility is one notion adopted in diverse formats by numerous cities to create a more inclusive, just, healthy and sustainable urban life. The focus of this thesis is to ex- amine whether a car-free mobility concept is applicable to the Maun Science Park, Bot- swana. Therefore, the idea of car-free mobility, its positive aspects as well as its con- straints, are described first. This illustrates the complexity of urban transport planning as it is intertwined with urban land-use, political vision and people’s perceptions and behav- iors. Secondly, examples and strategies on how to change existing structures are pre- sented. Following this, the smart developments in the field of sustainable urban mobility are considered to provide an insight into their assets and drawbacks. Then the local mo- bility conditions are examined before the car-free concept is exemplarily applied to the Maun Science Park via scenario construction. These scenarios give a first vision of how a car-free concept can be applied to the MSP and additionally provide a starting point for future strategic planning as well as inspiration for other cities to follow along.
Digitization and sustainability are the two big topics of our current time. As the usage of digital products like IoT devices continues to grow, it affects the energy consumption caused by the Internet. At the same time, more and more companies feel the need to become carbon neutral and sustainable. Determining the environmental impact of an IoT device is challenging, as the production of the hardware components should be considered and the electricity consumption of the Internet since this is the primary communication medium of an IoT device. Estimating the electricity consumption of the Internet itself is a complex task. We performed a life cycle assessment (LCA) to determine the environmental impact of an intelligent smoke detector sold in Germany, taking its whole life-cycle from cradle-to-grave into account. We applied the impact assessment method ReCiPe 2016 Midpoint and compared its results with ILCD 2011 Midpoint+ to check the robustness of our results. The LCA results showed that electricity consumption during the use phase is the main contributor to environmental impacts. The mining of coal causes this contribution, which is a part of the German electricity mix. Consequently, the smoke detector mainly contributes to the impact categories of freshwater and marine ecotoxicity, but only marginally to global warming.
Research Report
(2024)